


Threadbare Shirt

by pyrrhical (anoyo)



Category: Merlin - Fandom
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2009-12-09
Updated: 2009-12-09
Packaged: 2018-05-18 14:20:03
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 424
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5931544
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/anoyo/pseuds/pyrrhical
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Being his manservant, Merlin has seen Arthur in many varying states of dress. Formal, battle, cleaning, bathing, religious -- Merlin has dressed and undressed Arthur for almost every ceremony and circumstance that he can imagine.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Threadbare Shirt

**Author's Note:**

> Originally posted 12/9/09: [here](http://merlinadvent.livejournal.com/35758.html).

Being his manservant, Merlin has seen Arthur in many varying states of dress. Formal, battle, cleaning, bathing, religious -- Merlin has dressed and undressed Arthur for almost every ceremony and circumstance that he can imagine.

His favorite state of Arthur's attire, however, is whatever Arthur is wearing when he isn't expected anywhere or to do anything. When nothing is expected of Arthur, Arthur wears a pair of soft, worn breeches, scuffed boots that no amount of polish can make presentable, and an overlarge shirt that Merlin is positive was never meant to belong to the crown prince, as Arthur is fully grown and no one would have fitted him for "growing clothes" with the look he was meant to show to the people. 

If Merlin thinks about it -- and he does, though not when Arthur might have any inclination that he is doing so -- he believes that it must be Uther's shirt, considering its age and the state of it, and he is forced to step outside the misstep with Arthur's character that that thought produces. The emotional tendency to keep physical things is not one he would associate with Arthur, but it appears that, sometimes, people do things that are outside the careful lines that he draws around them.

Merlin know that, if Arthur were to know everything about Merlin, surely some of those details would not align with whatever impression he has formed of his manservant. That's part of creating a human life, and a real person, not merely the character that fulfills a role.

He knows that it's ridiculous to think of the Arthur in these threadbare -- though still nicer than anything Merlin has ever owned, even in their comparative disrepair -- as the "real" Arthur, as all of Arthur comes together to become whatever it is that truly defines Arthur, but he does believe that this slightly-more-carefree Arthur is one that steps outside any of the preformed roles that life has created for him. Maybe it's an Arthur created because of those roles, and thus as "created" as any of them, but Merlin feels a closer, strange connection with this Arthur.

Maybe, someday, he'll look back on this feeling and recognize it as something else. Maybe he will forget it altogether. Right now, it is the perception that he begins to form around the man that he has begun to understand through sheer repetition. A surprisingly complex man, when Merlin lets himself admit that, who can wear a threadbare shirt and still be undoubtedly the prince he is in every other role.


End file.
